Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Blogger vs IKEA 2: The returnening!

After an arduous weekend, the office emptied, and Kiernan's big boy room is all ready for set-up!

Last night I dragged the IKEA HEMNES bunk bed boxes up to the room and began (carefully) opening the cardboard.

"Lara," I called downstairs, "What colour did we order?"

"Antique - It only comes in antique... why? What did they give us?"

"Black."

She came up and took a look "Yep, that's black. Count the pieces."

We had wondered how a bunk bed could fit into two boxes when Lara had brought the boxes from her parents' house, but after checking the website in my usual paranoid manner, we saw that yes, the HEMNES comes in two boxes. Technically we got two boxes and a bundle of wooden slats... I just figured so few slats were just further apart.

But alas, it turns out instead of this...

... the warehouse had given us this:

On top of it all, we couldn't locate the receipt. I've got receipts for crushed stone delivered to my driveway three and a half years ago, but not from a bunk bed, paid in cash two weeks ago. We had also purchased a DAVE laptop stand on a separate purchase, and that receipt was also missing, so they're probably hiding somewhere together, fearful of my IKEA wrath.

I lugged the bed across town (what's up with this one IKEA per city rule anyway?) where I received ticket #249 for service. They were serving 236, a lady who was screaming at the supervisor about some silk flowers she wanted to return. The supervisor was almost in tears, so of course my retail-brain kicks in and I start feeling sympathy for the evil IKEA people who gave me the wrong bed.

After the lady stormed past, it became apparent that there was only one customer service rep working alongside the supervisor. The red-eyed supervisor came out and let us know individually that their system was down and they can still process returns, but would we like water or a hot dog or ice cream. Damn your friendly tactics, IKEA staff!

Of course, as she got to me I quickly explained my situation: Wrong bed, no receipt, purchased on the 17th of January at around 2pm. She went "Oh dear." and grabbed a phone off her belt to call the warehouse. She chatted a bit, told me they would definitely fix this, and went to the back room.

I tried to not think of all the customers who she hadn't gotten to yet, glaring at me for depriving them of the free offer of hot dogs and lingonberry juice.

Since the system was down, they had no way of getting to my record at the moment, but the supervisor took my name and number and will be calling me today around lunchtime. She said they WILL get me my bunk bed, and also offered to pay for my gas for wasting my trip. The absolute nerve of IKEA employees softening my anger with your excellent customer service! Gr!

Apologies go out to customers #242 through #248 who were still waiting for service as I lugged the bed back to the car.